The KDE Release Dude has posted updated release schedules for KDE 2.0.1, a bug-fix and translation release due out next week, and KDE 2.1, which will provide new functionality and improvements in many areas of KDE. The first beta of KDE 2.1 is due out in three weeks. Niels Træholt Frnack wrote in to tell us that KAlliance has released Milestone 1 of Magellan, a very promising PIM client (the website seems to be a bit broken); some mouth-watering (but large) screenshots are available here.Rik Hemsley has put up an article explaining how one can use multithreading in a KDE or Qt program and why the KDE libs don't use threading. Daniel Molkentin wrote in that KDE-EDU mailing list, which aims to help people that want to bring KDE into schools or to develop educational software, has been reopened. Finally, BSD Today
has publishd a quite favorable review of our favorite browser, Konqueror.

Java support improved - better security, now uses the Java 1.2 URLClassLoader
and friends to download applets. Note that the code now requires at least
JDK 1.2 (or compatible).

New 'transitional mode' used when parsing old HTML, allows greater compatibility
with badly-formed pages etc. without causing a performance hit for pages that
use HTML correctly. This change is invisible to users.

Many other fixes

KIO

Proxy auto-configuration implemented

Support for proxies that need authentication

Icons

The standard icons are now 34x34 instead of 32x32 to allow the use of the
alpha channel for shadows.

One feature that I really miss in KDE and this feature is available on all GTK based apps is the auto key assignments:

You click on the menu, point your mouse to an option, click set of keys (example - ALT Q) - and that's it - it's assigned for good. You can also remove
it easily..

Any chance that KDE will have this feature?

This was discussed quite a bit and discarded as being undesirable from a HUI perspective. Why, you may ask? Because programs can then have inconsistent key strokes to perform the same task, it was argued. For example, if you change app A to use Ctrl-P for pasting, but in app B it's printing, well, it gets confusing. So in KDE it's all done globally in the control panel.

Of course you can make the argument that the GUI should not enforce consistency, or that the mechanism you describe should be a short-cut to the global change.

Hell Yeah! I've been wanting recursive permission changes for ever! There is one thing. You should be able to apply recursive permission changes to "All subfolders" as well(ignoring files). This is because you need the "Enter" permission on folders, but you don't necessarily want to make all the files executable. Currently, all my mp3z are marked executable for this reason.

Perhaps something like this(similar to Webmin):
Apply changes to:
(Drop down box)
This Directory Only
This Directory & it's files
All Subdirectories
All Subdirectories & files

> >Devices can now appear in the directory treea nd will be mounted on demand

> Hell Yeah! But will drives be easily accessible with the "File Open" dialog?

You can't mount something from the filedialog, sorry. But why not use an automounter for that? I have cdrom, cdr and my jaz-drive all automounted, so I just need to point the filebrowser to /misc/jaz to mount it, for example.

Another thing that has been added is a possibility to save images that are linked to directly from HTML pages. Excellent for saving screenshots or porn :-)

What is missing though is showing the pictures during transmission. kview seems towait until the pircutre has been completely loaded. This gives konqueror an undeserved slow feeling during browsing. It is even more amaziong because pictures embedded in HTML are shown during load.

On the same lines, is it possible to view images like gqview on gnome?. I mean, click an image icon on the left pane (file manager view) and view it fully on the right pane? One could click on an icon or thumbnail after navigating to it and view it on the right. Currently, if an icon is clicked, the picture loads in the same window or pane, and it is troublesome to go back to view another (or drag and drop). As I understand it, this could be done with some script. This could be very useful for viewing large number of images.
Another "problem" I have noted is concerning transparent images, especially circuit diagrams and technical figures obtained from the net. Click on a thumbnail, and the image opens in a window, with a dark grey background. The background should be white, so that the image can be viewed (it gets camoflaged and hardly visible). I attempted to change this setting but could not find out how.

This is by far some of the best I've seen conserning PIM's! Finally Evolution's got som heavy competition:-)
The KDE-league should really sponsor these kind of projects, which are essencial for desktop-users. I've yet to see a good "all-in-one-mail-and-global-address-list+contacts" replacement for Outlook.
Kmail kan compete with Oultook on stability, and security, but not - unfortunetly - on functionalily. I hope Magellan is a bit more MT-designed than Kmail tho...

Magellan looks very nice.
A question? There is nothing in changelog about
KOffice. Has KWord been improved lately? It is
totally useless because of a nasty bug
that has been reported to bugs.kde.org. (fonts
dissapear on the right side of the page).
I would like to see KDE2 more stable than it is now.
BTW, I use Mandrake 7.2.

The changelog as it stands, only lists the parts of KDE I've been monitoring and some additions David has made. The idea is that developers of the other apps to be included in the release will add the changes for their own apps to the log via CVS.

I don't know what has changed in KWord, so it isn't in the list, but I think that they have been fairly minor in this release so far. At the moment I think 2.1 is much more about improving the core functionality of the desktop, with only some of the application having major updates.

Hopefully work is done between the Magellan project and KDE to provide a standard contact database, since there are wayy to many. KMail can use it's own, it can use Kab, etc... and then add another one for magellan? I hate re-doing all my contacts.

These last few days I was playing with GNOME to see how far did they get since I last work with it. I used Helixcode's GNOME with all updates and I tried Nautilus as well.

I played on Celeron 400 with 128 MB and GNOME just wasn't as responsive as KDE2 on my machine (which is PII 350 with 128 MB RAM). Using Nautilus got even worse, because beta2 of it is unbelievably memory hungry. When I tried to open Eazel services, it ate 87 MB of RAM.

Anyway, I'm going off here. What I want to say is that I don't share your experience. I'm quite sure others don't share mine with GNOME. On my machine, KDE2 generally isn't slower than KDE1 though some things are. For example, changing background picture when I change desktop takes quite some time, but doesn't bother me much because application windows are ready much sooner so it doesn't really interfere with my work.

It's not possible to tell if one desktop is too slow relying only on one man experience. However, I do agree that Linux desktops these days seem to need just as powerful hardware as Windows.

Have you compiled yourself KDE 2, or just installed a precompiled archive ?
In the latter case, it is possible KDE2 wasn't compiled with the -fno-exception switch. Exceptions are not used by KDE, and results in unused and unshared code that slow down program loading, and bloat memory usage uselessly.

I share your experience, that apps need much more time AND cpu-usage when being loaded. I use a pre-compiled version, so doing it myself is next.
Could somebody who has it at hand post a short list of compiler-options for optimized speed (there was s.th. like --no-opengl, wasn't it?), please?

I also have feeling KDE2 being slower than KDE1.
First, starting the whole thing (restoring all programs) takes eternity. Second, logging out and saving all takes an another eternity. And Konqueror is very slow. I tried Netscape 4.73, new Opera and Konqueror side by side with many different www-pages. Opera is the fastest, Netscape is second and Konqueror is definitely the slowest. Additionally, Konqueror doesn't remember the vertical position of the page like Opera. It is very annoying when I start reading a re-loaded page and it suddenly moves vertically. Opera starts with the right position right away. Much is to be done.

Strange, for me Konqueror is clearly the fastest, followed by Opera and Netscape. Something I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is the dynamic rendering that Konqueror uses, where the pages are displayed right away and refitted as more of the page is processed. Opera and Netscape often process more or less the whole page and then displays it. Not to mention Operas font handling that really sucked on my computer.

All these responses about KDE2 being slow strike me as very strange. I'd been using an updated RH6 for the last year, until I switched to Mandrake 7.2 a few weeks ago. I didn't like KDE1, so I'd always used (helix)gnome and sometimes windowmaker. I'd always been really annoyed about how slow and unresponsive things were, especially when doing things like playing MP3s. This is on a 96Mb/K6-2 450. Just changing virtual desktops under gnome would take 1 or 2 seconds to redraw the screen. Windows has always been much faster and more responsive on my machine.

However with MDK7.2 and KDE2, I've been extremely impressed. The interface just flies for me (I think this is a GTK+ vs QT issue) and Konqueror is the same speed as, if not faster than IE5 in windows on the same machine (which is very fast).

I think there are a lot of configuration problems going around, as I've noticed a large divide between people running KDE2 fast and well, and people who think it's slow and buggy. For me, it's better than anything else I've used (BeOS, Windows, MacOS, Gnome).

I think KDE2 is super fast. It sucks up a lot of memory though. I can't play Unreal Tournament or run Quickbooks Pro unless I'm in Gnome(or have only been logged into KDE a few minutes).

But it's still superfast. Konqueror is superfast. Try resizing Netscape and it takes 5 seconds to come back...Konqueror is instand(like Explorer). The problem I have is that Konqueror has a 10 minutes lifespan before it crashes.

I have heard many comments that to speed up kde & qt , use the --fno-exceptions option. I used it to compile kde2 & qt. I have also heard that the exceptions result in a lot of unused objects and memory use. I have also noticed that kHTML and some other programs compile with the --fexceptions flag by default. I edited some makefiles to remove --fexceptions but it did not compile (could have missed some makefiles).

What is the use of exceptions then? If it is useless then this option should be removed to speed up the program. Just curious.

I haven't actually compiled without exceptions myself, but here's what I understand:

Qt itself doesn't need exceptions, and the *majority* (not all!) of the kde libraries don't use them either. Therefore, it's safe to turn them off with -fno-exceptions. BUT, some libraries DO use them, and these libraries explicitly turn on exceptions with -fexceptions (for those of you who compile with -fno-exceptions, I guess). You shouldn't be taking out the -fexceptions flag in the Makefiles!

So by this I take it that you're supposed to use the -fno-exeptions flag in the ./configure statement.

I've just compiled kde2 from scratch, and other than there being no documentation to tell you which order to compile the tar files (compile support before libs took me as a bit of a surprise) and kde2 seems to be not much different to kde1 as far as speed goes. However Kmail is increadibly slow!

Is there any documentation on compiling kicking around, and if so can it be put into the ftp site near the distributions section?

I just installed Mandrake 7.2. My experience is that KDE2 uses a lot more memory than KDE1. For my machine Celeron 333 w/ 64M SDRAM, KDE1 is faster than KDE2, I think. But I just increased my memory to 192M. I think KDE2 is fine now.

On my Mandrake 7.2 upgraded to kde2 final, the thing i found very slow is the logout. It take up to 10 or sometimes 15 seconds to exit the desktop.
Is there anything to do (modify the configuration for example, perhaps recompile from source)?

My experience is that KDE2 is faster than windows and KDE1. Konqueror is definitly faster than Netscape on my computer. Nothing beats BeOS though, but I don't think that is possible.
1.Because BeOS uses a smaller amount of features.
2.BeOS doesn't use X which seems to be very slow.
and so on.

Anyway I think that people with small amounts of Ram will find KDE1 to be faster than KDE2. I have experienced that windows have been faster than KDE on earlier installs, but now I'm mostly anoyed about how slow windows is to browse large directory structures for instance.

I read this thing about thred support in Qt. I have a dual celly 500. Will a threded KDE make it run more like a 1000? I meen, the more small proceses the better performance, rigt? Has this got anything to do with threding? /kidcat

I used to use Linux Mandrake 7.2 on my laptop (128M sdram, 500Mhz Mendocino Celeron, 4.8 G UDMA 33, 15.1" TFT XGA display, 8M ATI Rage LT Pro, 24x CDROM). Well, my personal experience is that KDE2 is alot slower than KDE 1. I've tried a custom compiled version and the Mandrake 7.2 version but both still much slower than KDE 7.2. It takes forever to open any applications. In KDE 1, opening, say, kedit is a snap. In KDE 2, opening kedit takes twice as long! Also, I think the default MP3 Player that comes with KDE 2 sucks! It takes forever to load from HDD and uses much more CPU power. Why bother using Arts Sound when one can have much better performance and little usage by using soundcards native driver, say Maestro Driver supported by Linux 2.4 for my card!

I think this is the second time you submit this kind of complaint. Both times with not enough details so that we understand what you mean.

KDE applications have default profiles that are stored in the configuration and are used for each new instance of the app. This applies for example to Konqueror, except that this particular app is able to handle many such profiles. If you want to get a particular profile as a default (like a maximized size for your konqueror windows) you *need* to save them (use "Save Options" before quitting your application).

On the other hand, quitting a whole KDE section while having applications open (and maximized for example) will bring them to you in exactly the same shape if you choose to save the session at logout.

Anyways, maybe I understand you wrong, so please provide more details.

He got confused and he didn't look in Window (on menu bar) where he can Save View Profile Web Browsing or File Managment. That's because Save settings from Settings (on menu bar) has been removed, and people are not (yet) used to it.

Geometry or to be able pass the parameter -geometry was one of the best features with KDE1/1.1.2 that it seems has not been continued with KDE2.

I am not talking about Konqueror and its method of saving its defaults!

I am questioning the fact that with this new KDE2 firstly you can no longer pass the - geometry parameter on your kdelink files or can you as it seems save maximized settings in most other programs to fit your desktop. Now you have this half view of any package you open, in order to run it in full screen each time you open it up, you have to maximize it via the buttons. (Is it really that odd to want to open say a word processor in full screen view from default)!

Do you all really think its looks good or is useful having programs that open half way off the screen on your desktop. And do we need to run another windows manager in order to control geometry as is the case with Gnome?

So he's yet another RMS lover isn't he?
Just like the rest of the KDE and Gnome camp.
When do you people realize that GNU is bad?
The viral GPL for example, it stands for communism and is restrictive as hell.
I can't even control my software, how is that freedom?
And RMS, a greater jerk is does not exists.
He and his Free Shit Foundation are only looking for power and wants to own everything.
Look at FSF's site, and read it for yourself: "Why software shouldn't have owners".
And unlike the free licenses such as BSD, the GPL is like communism: "you can't have this, it belongs to us". Freedom my ass!

ANYBODY DENYING THIS IS A LOOSER AND IGNORANT TO THE REALITY!
IF YOU WANT TO SHOW YOUR LACK OF INTELLIGENCE, DENY THIS AND YOU'LL BE KILLED BY GOD!
!@#$%&*^%$&*@!&(*%$@!